Sunday, 8 January 2012

About ten years ago artist Cliff Chiang whipped up, just for fun, a bunch of pastiches of DC superheroes and classic Anime.

The results are pretty durned awexome:

I love Science Ninja Hero Batman, Superman as a Gaiking-style Giant Robot piloted by a young boy’s wristwatch (with Clark Kent as the scientist who invented the robot), and the crazy Wonder Woman/Captain Harlock mashup.

DC actually briefly considered greenlighting this, but eventually passed. It’s too bad.
I would absolutely read this comic.

Thursday, 7 February 2008

I have to tell you about this dream I had last night. It was one of the craziest in recent memory. I didn’t actually dream it in order, but I’ll try to have it make more sense here:

Gene Hackman’s Lex Luthor from the Superman movies, Danny DeVito from the Romancing the Stone movies, and Sandra Bernhardt from Hudson Hawk all teamed up to bring about an apocalypse. Their plan: to use two tiny, gold-filled barges in a small pond on the side of a hill to perform an arcane ritual during a lunar eclipse to summon Unicron.

I’m completely serious.

My brother, Geoff, and I were all secret agents (who were staked out in the house I grew up in) who were supposed to stop this from happening.

Unfortunately I was distracted by having to deal with an enraged (and strangely small at only about 10 feet tall) Optimus Prime, who had arrived on earth in his day-glo dune buggy and was driving it around the city like a maniac, looking for those who were in league with his arch-enemy Unicron.

I eventually got him to calm down some, but the time I wasted in dealing with him meant that the united villains had time to initiate the ritual! Mike & Geoff called me to tell me that they’d pinpointed the location where the ritual was taking place, so I hopped in my car and started driving north on the freeway to get there. I looked off to my left and saw the moon for just an instant before it was completely enveloped in black. Not just a lunar eclipse, this was unnatural, black-magic black. It was a portal! I had to hurry and stop the ritual before Unicron could cross through!

Suddenly, though, the black disc of the moon got all distorted and stretched out. I asked Geoff (over the car’s radio), “Is that supposed to happen?”

“Um… I don’t think so,” Geoff answered.

Pretty soon the moon suddenly blinked back to normal. Had the ritual succeeded or failed? I drove on, arriving at the side of the hill just after dawn.

Disguising myself as an elderly black gentleman, I secretly parked the car out of sight and climbed the hill, pretending to be merely out for a morning stroll. I soon came across the site of the ritual and saw what had prevented it from happening: there had been a small landslide that had filled half of the pond and buried one of the barges! We’d been lucky.

The villains’ henchmen, dressed in the red uniforms of the aliens from the V miniseries, were busy draining the rest of the pond and digging out the barge. One of them saw me and shooed me away with, “Hey, you’re not allowed to be here!”

“What’s going on?” I asked in my elderly black gentleman voice.

“We’re just cleaning up a landslide,” the henchman said. “Nothing to see here. Move along.”

I glanced down the hill towards the pond where I saw the three main movie villains all acting very upset. Sandra Bernhardt was so upset that she was drinking the bottle of Champagne that they’d planned on saving until after they’d summoned Unicron.

I made my way back down to the bottom of the hill and was confronted by a confused but unreasonably attractive young Japanese woman who wanted to know what was going on. I kind of hit on her while telling her that it was just some forest workers cleaning up a landslide. She giggled and thought I was a charming old man. Something seemed suspicious, though; she seemed very out of place.

I excused myself and made my way back to the car and drove back to the house where Mike and Geoff were. For some reason they were making elaborate, extremely risky plans to retrieve the gold barges. But I got the sense that they didn’t want to retrieve the barges to stop the ritual, but because they wanted the gold! They’d gone all greedy! And I was certain the plans they were making were going to compromise all three of us (if they hadn’t already), so I quickly gathered my things and slipped out of the house through the backyard.

That night the trio of villains had cleaned up the hillside and pond and were ready to try again. There was a funny scene where they all waded into the pond up to their waists except for Danny DeVito, who was so short that the water came up to his chin and he had to tilt his head back to keep from getting water in his mouth. They stood in between the two barges. Gene Hackman kept on having to shove them apart because they kept on drifting together, threatening to crush the trio.

They looked up to the moon and started calling out things like, “O Unicron, great and powerful! We implore that you hear us!”

After doing this for a while Gene Hackman and Sandra Bernhardt got bored and waded ashore, but they told Danny DeVito that he had to stay in the pond for the ritual to work. Sandra Bernhardt started drinking more Champagne. Danny DeVito was upset, especially when as a side effect of the ritual the pond water started to rise! There was even wacky background music as Danny DeVito struggled to stay afloat and keep the barges from crushing him!

At some point I had a conversation with Optimus Prime in which we realized that even if we stopped the ritual this time, someone might try again and succeed later in the future. The only way to be sure was to destroy Unicron completely. At that, my dream cut to a scene of a Unicron-sized Optimus Prime grappling with Unicron.

What was the ultimate outcome? I have no idea. I’d like to assume that Optimus Prime won, but my dream ended with Danny DeVito still struggling in the pond while Sandra Bernhardt drank Champagne with Gene Hackman’s Lex Luthor. So I guess I’ll never actually know.